This section is intended to provide a background or context to the disclosed embodiments. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The proliferation of digital cameras and camera-equipped smartphones, along with sophisticated image processing software such as Adobe Photoshop® have made it extremely easy to alter digital photographs, and such doctored photographs are appearing with increasing frequency. Conventional digital forensic techniques use variations of statistical analysis to detect alterations due to cloning, resampling, splicing and the like. While useful in many different contexts, these techniques are not capable of authenticating every individual pixel in a digital image.